Blackbeard the Pirate
Are you a fan of movies and books about pirates? If so, you’ll probably be celebrating International Pirate Month in August!
The Mini Page invites you aboard as we learn more about Blackbeard, the most famous pirate of all time.
Early outlaws
During the 1700s, pirates were the outlaws of the sea. They chased down and took over
merchant ships carrying goods back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean or up and down the Atlantic coast. Then they sold the “booty.”
Blackbeard’s group of pirates made their base in the Bahamas and were active only for about seven years, from 1713 to 1720.
Terrorizing the seas
In October 1717, on a ship called Blackbeard and his crew attacked other ships in Chesapeake Bay, Philadelphia and New York Harbor. As they were sailing in the eastern Caribbean, they captured a French slave ship with 516 slaves chained below deck.
Revenge, Blackbeard renamed the ship Queen
Anne’s Revenge and kept a small number of slaves to work as its crew.
Blackbeard’s last battle
Blackbeard and many of his men settled in North Carolina near Bath and Ocracoke, where they could easily launch their ships and return with their loot. The governor there, Charles Eden, let them stay because the thieves provided him with many luxuries, such as sugar and chocolate.
But Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Alexander Spotswood, wasn’t as welcoming. He sent Royal Navy Lt. Robert Maynard to North Carolina with two ships to defeat Blackbeard.
When the battle began, one of Maynard’s ships was ambushed by Blackbeard’s men. But aboard the second ship, Maynard’s men hid below the deck, and when the pirates boarded the ship, they attacked.
Blackbeard was killed by Maynard on Nov. 22, 1718. The sailors cut off his head and strung it up on their ship, and they tossed his body into the sea.
Queen Anne’s Revenge
In November 1996, a search team found cannons and anchors on the ocean floor near Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina. Other items they found led the discovery team to believe that the ship was the Queen Anne’s Revenge.
In 2004, the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and a number of other items have been recovered since then.
Blackbeard’s life
Historians don’t know a lot about Blackbeard. His real name was Edward Thatch, and he was probably born in England around 1680. He went to the Bahamas in 1713 and started working with Benjamin Hornigold, a Jamaican
privateer, or sailor on an armed ship. Hornigold put Thatch in charge of his own pirate ship in 1716.
Blackbeard had a frightening appearance: He was tall and thin and wore long hair and a long, dark beard. During battles, he wrapped slow-burning coils in his beard, which made smoke and fire swirl around his head.
But while he was scary-looking, some historians believe he never killed anyone until his final battle.
In fact, many people in Britain and the Colonies thought of Blackbeard as a Robin Hood-like hero, fighting against cruel and harsh rulers.